John Roberts’ year-end message was rightly taken to task for implying that criticism of the court’s corruption was inciting violence. If the Chief Justice can’t defend the right of the people to criticize the Supreme Court then they really have gone down the rabbit hole.
But he made another point that’s worth looking at as well:
Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the court, popular or not, have been followed. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.
I can’t think of any prominent Democrats making that argument but I suppose there might have been at one point. But as Bill Kristol notes in his Substack:
[T]his sounds an awful lot like a subtweet of incoming Vice President JD Vance, who has repeatedly argued that Trump should ignore court orders that he believes unconstitutionally constrain his executive authority. “If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘you’re not allowed to do that’—like, that is the constitutional crisis,” Vance told Politico last March. “It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response.”
Roberts better hope asking nicely will do the trick. After all, he was the one who reached into his bag of tricks last year to carve out a broad new definition of criminal immunity for a president’s “official acts.” Like much of the rest of the country, Roberts appears to be entering the new year with a bizarre optimism: Sure, the incoming administration has openly said it will do many alarming things. But wouldn’t it be nice if they just didn’t?
Vance has been backing Musk’s embrace of the neo-Nazis in Germany so I think he really means it. Whether Trump wants that fight is unknown but I doubt he’ll care if his people want to wage it. He can observe it from the golf course and he knows he’ll suffer no repercussions.
It brings to mind the apparently apocryphal comment by Andrew Jackson, who Steve Bannon convinced Trump he most resembles: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” It sounds like Vance is pretty much saying the same thing. But really, all he has to do is ask John Roberts and he’ll do whatever they want.